Perry Link

A Fallen Artist in Mao’s China

Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow, a fictionalized account of the life of the actress Sun Weishi, depicts the hypocrisy of the Communist elites and the fate of those who embraced new ideals after the revolution.

How Cruel Is Nature?: An Exchange

The CCP’s Culture of Fear

In China under Xi Jinping, idealism is passé and conformity a shell for the ruthless pursuit of hierarchical power and private interests.

Seeing the CCP Clearly

For Chinese dissidents, the end of Washington's deference to Beijing has been a long time coming.

Before the Revolution

Eileen Chang’s ‘Little Reunions’

China's New Censorship

Authoritarians, in China and elsewhere, normally have preferred to dress their authoritarianism up in pretty clothes. But in the era of Xi Jinping, repression is often stated baldly, even proudly.

The Passion of Liu Xiaobo

Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was sentenced to eleven years for “inciting subversion” of China’s government, died of liver cancer today.

Remembering Bob Silvers

On the late editor of The New York Review

A Magician of Chinese Poetry

The Mind in Chinese

In Western languages, especially in their modern versions, do we sometimes use nouns to conceive things when we don’t really need to?

If Mao Had Been a Hermit

China: Novelists Against the State

Politics in Mao’s China

In her prescient 1954 novel, Naked Earth, Eileen Chang describes a Communist Chinese village in which the need to maintain a correct exterior turns public political language into a kind of chess game.

The Wonderfully Elusive Chinese Novel

David Tod Roy’s translation of ‘Chin P’ing Mei’

China's War on Wit

If the case against Chinese human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang results in a criminal conviction and a lengthy prison term, the effects on China’s Internet will be devastating.

‘China Strikes Back’: An Exchange

He Exposed Corrupt China Before He Left

Albert Ho: Hong Kong Rising

Earlier protests might be described as struggles for freedom from something—censorship or brainwashing of our children. The protest a few days ago was a demand for something: the people want free elections in order to take charge of their own house.

China: Detained to Death

The death of Chinese activist Cao Shunli after denial of medical treatment, horrific in itself, is all the more disturbing because it follows a pattern that has emerged with other Chinese detainees.

Tiananmen: Money vs. Ideas

The Chinese government’s use of lethal force against protesters in Tiananmen Square was a choice, and from the regime’s point of view the correct choice. But the massacre, as if having a will of its own, seems to come back to undermine whatever the regime claims as its legitimacy.